Thin Provisioning

Storage Delivered Just-In-Time

Even though the cost per GB is dropping, there is no need to waste space when there is a simple solution to maximise utilisation of it. Thin-provisioning provides this solution by allocating physical space in smaller pieces rather than allocating and dedicating the entire volume at provisioning time. The volume presented appears to be the full provisioned capacity to the application servers, but nothing has been allocated until write operations occur. This not only delivers 3x better storage utilization but also eases system administration because there is no penalty for presenting large volumes to the application servers on day one.

Thin-provisioning provides outstanding storage utilization efficiency by writing data to the back-end disks only when data is written by the applications. This results in 3x better storage utilisation.

Thin-provisioning is inherent in virtual disk pools. Simply create a virtual volume from a disk pool, present it to the application servers and SANsymphony-V does the rest. Disk pools span all physical devices in the pool, and are not dependent on any host, operating system, or server hypervisor.

Feature Highlights Summary

Appears to computers as very large drives (e.g. >2 TB virtual disks from a few hundred GB drives)